Error setting environment variables in python

Question

I am trying to use Bloomberg python API. I need to set BLPAPI_ROOT environment variable for this. I added,

export BLPAPI_ROOT="/home/user/Downloads/blpapi_cpp_3.6.3.1"
export PATH=$PATH:$BLPAPI_ROOT

to my .bashrc file and ran source .bashrc. Now, when I open python shell and do,

print os.environ['BLPAPI_ROOT'] 

it gives me correct output. But when the same this runs inside the setup.py provided, it throws a

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 27, in <module>
    blpapiRoot = os.environ['BLPAPI_ROOT']
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/UserDict.py", line 23, in __getitem__
    raise KeyError(key)
KeyError: 'BLPAPI_ROOT'

What am I missing here ?

System : Ubuntu 12.04 Python 2.7

Answer 1

I would try using it the following way:

import os
try:
    os.environ['BLPAPI_ROOT'] = "/home/user/Downloads/blpapi_cpp_3.6.3.1"
except EnvironmentError:
    sys.exit(1)

Answer 2

This is quite old, but for anyone searching, you can get around this by setting sudo to keep the environmental variable BLPAPI_ROOT, a la keep environmental variables using sudo .

sudo visudo

Then add:

Defaults env_keep +="BLPAPI_ROOT"

You can now run:

sudo python setup.py install

and it should work just fine.